Page 106 of Serpent and Shadow

Walking over to a small cauldron on a white-blue fire, he lifted it by its long, blackened handle. He tilted the small chamber as he bent down to peer into it, presumably to check the progress of something happening inside that small pot. He went on speaking to me lazily, as if he hadn’t just answered a thought passing through my head.

“We were discussing something,” he remarked, a hint of impatience mixed with warning in his words. “What is your latest progress with the collar? Greythorne was working on that, was he not?” His pale eyes briefly shifted to assess mine. “Ironically, the most comprehensive texts on magic suppression live inside the Sanctum Occulus. Some of those texts were stolen in the raid, but not all of them.”

Was the voice his raven perhaps?

“No,” Blackstone said, sharper, with more impatience. “Do you intend to answer my questions? Or is this to be a pointless guessing game?”

“No,” I said. Then, thinking, I added, “We’ve been thinking about distractions. If I get good enough to bring a bunch of us into the Black Tower, that is.” I quirked an eyebrow at him. “Alaric’s gotten us a ridiculously large amount of the human drug, L.S.D. We figured that would cause a bit of chaos.”

Blackstone lifted his head from where he’d bent back over the talisman. He stared at me with unmoving eyes, as if waiting for me to tell him I was joking. “That is the most positively idiotic idea I’ve ever heard,” he said flatly.

I couldn’t suppress a faint smile. “You’ve heard of it, then? Lysergic acid diethylamide? It’s a human hallucinogen. Quite strong, especially in the amounts Alaric has.”

He’d already lowered his head back to the talisman. “I’ve heard of it. I know what it does. Again, I hope you are not serious. That is a stupid, reckless idea. Something only a half-human would even contemplate.”

“It was Alaric’s idea,” I reminded him.

He didn’t answer.

I watched his back as he lifted up the small, iron-looking cauldron he’d grabbed before and brought it over to the talisman. Using a small spout, he poured liquid silver over where he’d tied the thread.

He sprinkled a few different powders over the cooling silver, murmuring castings under his breath. At the end, he pressed a pence-sized jewel into the center of the silver seal.

Stepping back, he surveyed his work.

He must have been satisfied, because he walked the iron pot back over to the still flaming stove, and set it carefully back on the burner.

“Are you still planning to break into the Tower, then?” he asked. “I thought you told me young Mr. Bones was quite adamant you not do that… for reasons that sounded quite sensible.”

His back was to me again, but I rolled my eyes.

“For a revolutionary, you’re not exactly revolutionary,” I pointed out. “We have to stop Malefic from his Ascension, and his ‘Great Ritual.’ You know as well as I do that he’ll perform both rituals at the Tower. We need a plan to thwart that.”

“Can you repeat it?” he asked in that deep, resonant voice. “The phasing? You’ve only accomplished it the once, haven’t you? And I don’t recall you ever saying how you accomplished it. Or if it was something you could do again.”

I folded my arms, exhaling. “I actually phased a few times. The first time, it was because I got attacked. Someone slammed into me by the fountain, and I phased through the marble base. The second time, I jumped out a window in Bones’s tower.”

The pot clanked where he knocked into it with a hand.

That time when he turned, he narrowed his pale eyes at me.

Just then, Morag herself made an appearance, flapping up to the window and landing heavily on her perch. I was standing right next to it, mostly because I preferred to be by the open window when Blackstone was brewing all of his concoctions at once, otherwise the smell was overpowering to the point it made me dizzy.

“Hey, Mo,” I murmured to her.

She squawked a hello in my general direction, then began clicking and clucking.

“I didn’t forget this time,” I assured her.

I reached into my pocket and fished out a walnut, which she took happily from my fingers. She stuck it carefully between her toes and hammered at it with her black beak. I’d learned she preferred to shell them herself.

She grumbled and chortled appreciatively as she began to eat the nut from around the broken shell.

When I glanced back at Blackstone, he was watching me with Morag.

“You told Mocking about Bones’s condition?” he asked.

His voice was deceptively casual.